The Pirate Bay to Drop CloudFlare Amid Concern

The Pirate Bay has finally made a public response to concerns regarding their use of the U.S.-based CDN service, CloudFlare. On top of that, owners have responded to the public outcry of concerns regarding moderators place and the safety, security and validity of torrents on the site.

Keeping the site alive with and helping push millions of queries through per day is CloudFlare, a web performance and security service. San Francisco-based CloudFlare is right in the USA, a nation that is not fond of The Pirate Bay or copyright concerns in general. Many worried that the use of CloudFlare on the torrent site would allow for U.S. authorities to spy on users through the domain.

Others even rumored that the FBI had already infiltrated the site and did so during the raid. Many have offed such concerns as original Pirate Bay staffers have been voicing their thoughts on the issues, disregarding all other conspiracies.

Today, The Pirate Bay responded about the possible security issues regarding if the company will continue to use CloudFlare services, stating it will only be used for a short amount of time to keep the server online with the millions of spike visits they continue to receive. The use will mitigate server load so the site doesn’t instantly go offline with the large amount of traffic they are receiving at one time.

“We have seen that there has been some question to why we are using Cloudflare. This is only initially to handle the massive load upon the servers. It will be removed shortly,” the company wrote on their blog.

Another massive concern users voiced was the lack of moderation within the site. The Pirate Bay previously told TorrentFreak insiders that they had taken away the rights from previous administrators, which had resulted in many angry staffers and lack of moderation within the site. Many acclaimed the site instantly had pollution issues with fake torrents and more.

Lack of clean up crew could result in the lack of legitimate torrents, meaning the site could lose credibility if users choose to upload intentionally malicious files.

Since the return, many anonymous uploaders instantly began abusing the lack of moderation and amass of fake torrents were uploaded and never removed. The Pirate Bay has since explained their decision to remove staff privileges and since added a “report” button for possibly malicious torrent files.

“Due to severe security issues regarding the old moderator team all moderation has temporarily been disabled,” The Pirate Bay said. “Before we sort everything out we have instead added a ‘Report link’ to all torrents which you can find in the details page. We believe in that the TPB community can help moderate the site for the time being.”

The Pirate Bay has already been responding to pirates that have chosen to flag fake torrents, removing a number of intentionally malicious files. Whether or not the report button will be as effective as the previous moderation que will be a bit of a stretch, but only time will tell.

The site also noted no torrents were lost during the police seizure as they have continuous rolling backups of the site at all times.

The Pirate Bay also brought back their .onion domain, allowing users to browse the torrent bazaar over the security of the Tor Network.

While The Pirate Bay did not return with a bang, it certainly did cause a lot of controversy throughout several communities. The recent announcement may be able to quiet conspiracy theories regarding the site and their future. One thing is for sure, previous staffers are still upset with the site due to the owners decisions to cut the moderators.